Business Intelligence

Ulrich Knechtel of AMD, talking about Business Intelligence.

<aside> IBM have made a $5B deal for Cognos—its biggest ever deal. </aside>

BI splits into: basic queries; reports; OLAP; data mining and EIS (Enterprise Information Systems). Excel; SQL Server Analytics server (and reporting server); Proclarity Analytics. From the hardware perspective, we need to be worried about the sheer volume of data that might be required to do BI.

Truism, but worth pointing out—not sure how this relates to BI: Performance is determined by the component with the lowest performance (e.g. CPU perf versus front-side bus perf). 64-bit does not help with Memory I/O but does help with large memory size and CPU perf. Database performance is 80% influenced by Memory I/O (as opposed to floating point and address calculation etc).

Memory I/O can then be broken down to Access speed to memory; transfer speed between memory and CPU; memory size and caches (how many caches, how they are shared by cores, cache size). 32 gig of memory is addressable with a 64-bit architecture.

After the first few minutes, this could have been about any processor intensive processing—not specifically BI. What a shame. Really not nearly as useful as we hoped or expected.